I completely agree on that point, and on that last point. Man that was a huge bummer.

Also, I think people seem to demand more quality and custom content as well. Not sure if I'm still grounded on this part, but that's how I generally feel, forcing me to not just go and whip up something and deliver.

(actually, I might try to do just that. And we'll see what comments we're going to get from the kids out there. )

GnaReffotsirk wrote:Also, I think people seem to demand more quality and custom content as well. Not sure if I'm still grounded on this part, but that's how I generally feel, forcing me to not just go and whip up something and deliver.

I think that this is a misconception. While I see a lot of really good detailed terrain for sc2, for example, I never felt inclined that if I were to make a project that I had to "one-up" these examples. Same with wc3. This is because quality is subjective, and something you can attain through many different means. Thus, it becomes difficult to compare quality subjectively.

There are things that people have come to expect but these are things I don't feel are necessarily hard, at least not for me, to obtain. Things such as a consistent soundtrack (not necessarily original in creation, just something that avoids using the same music everyone else uses e.g. trailer music), voice acting, and reasonably clean writing are all expected out of projects these days, and imo rightly so. That is because these are the building blocks to creating immersion, and immersion is the most powerful element in something like a campaign. After that, what you do contributes to your overall impact using that immersive energy.

I remember being drawn to two campaigns mainly for their mission design and plot progression respectively. IIRC, it was that mini-campaign about a cerebrate in terms of story telling, and drake clawfang's 3 chapter campaign in terms of mission design.

Drake's scenario's were good. Though the missions didn't pull me in to do two successive missions in a row, their value is in the challenge. The missions felt more like puzzles, where the player is tasked to solve the "riddle" of the scenario and thereby win. And that was in SC:BW, where not much AI scripting can be done. I imagine the variety, and the fun that comes with it, now that we can easily trigger in attack waves, even AI maneuvering on the map.

I realized the truth of those things you said up there only recently. I always argued they were secondary; I was wrong.

While WarCraft III had the ability to link maps and use data off other maps, it's true campaign packaging wasn't released until TFT came out, at which point you could (in theory) make campaigns identical to the WC3 lineup. The likely support for something like this probably wont be discussed until the final chapter in the SC2 "expansions."

I enjoy the lack of "filler content" that we were promised during the downtime between campaigns. The most we have coming up are a few custom maps, which have already been played and drained out. I spent a good fifteen minutes the other night waiting to see how long it'd take to start a game of Starjeweled, not a game I'm really fond of, but I like Bejeweled. They don't quite grasp the aspect of updates yet, while community mappers release their "internal" updates to be tested by the public, Blizzard rather interally test the products themselves and release a more polished map in the future. Unfortunately, by then no one would of cared since the player base for those maps are slimming. If they understood to just release maps in a steady stream of updates until the map is "perfected" then they would of acquired more praise. Will they ever learn this? Perhaps. Will it bleed over to their games? Not a chance, considering the maps are maintained by a separate team of folks at the moment.

As for lip syncing which was lightly discussed, all portraits in the game are lip synced, yes. But not how you would expect. In Half-Life 2, one of the first games to feature amazing lip syncing technology, everything was done on the fly, rendered if you will. Audio would be prebuffered and lip movement determined by the prebuffered audio which would then play in sync with the now rendered lips. If you were to replace audio at any time in the files, it would react to that as seen in that music video they created.

With StarCraft 2 however, if you look deep enough, you'll find that every lip sync is prerendered, meaning they used software to generate the lip sync to an audio, and exported the animation, and imported it into the game alongside the audio. If you were to change the audio, the lips would not adjust. It's been noted by Blizzard that you can call upon any of these animations for your own audio, though clearly the lips will not much, but in Blizzard's view it was better than having portraits with sealed lips.

The answer to this would be simple- animate moving lips in the portrait to get it to animate when clicked on or speaking, similar to that of WarCraft 3's methods. Unfortunately it's not what we would ultimately love to have in the end, but it's an option for now.

In all my concepts for sc2 projects I planned to have non-animated 2d portraits anyway. I figured I could do more with those than try to bastardize something else into working for me. Major cinematics would be pre-rendered from max and composited in After Effects. Even then, I don't think I would worry about moving mouths just because it would take far too long for me to figure out how to do that (and all of my characters would have been ripped from something and I wouldn't have rigs for them anyways).

A game several years older than StarCraft 2 had a perfectly awesome solution to rendering lipsync and Blizzard ops to reinvent a vastly inferior and constricting wheel to release to the fans.

It's this kind of not surprising horse shit that makes me not want to bother, ever.

I mean, I guess I COULD use the tool in GE to transfer SC1 maps to SC2 and then doodad them up and then copy over the ridiculously simplistic build-and-destroy "Triggers" from the campaigns to give obnoxious fanboys placebo ammunition to troll the forums, but my standards keep getting in the way.